OnSong^® Binder (aka Your Digital Cheat Sheet)

The OnSong^® Binder file format is basically OnSong's way of moving a song, a set, or like, your whole massive book of music between libraries. Think of it like the OnSong^® Archive but way cooler — it's got everything you need to rebuild your stuff somewhere else: the song text, attachments, styles, settings, transposition, annotations, the whole bleepin' kitchen sink. Except unlike an archive (which is basically a mystery blob), a binder is just a folder full of normal files. Which means you can actually look inside it, poke around, and it carries all the media your song depends on right there with it, all nice & platform-agnostic like.

The OnSong^® Binder file format rocks a file extension of either .onsongbinder or .binder, and a MIME type of application/onsong-binder.

What's Actually In There

A binder is a ZIP archive. Unzip one & boom — you'll find a folder named after the item's identifier, containing:

• manifest.json — the item itself, all serialized & fancy. Every blasted property OnSong knows about it, in the exact same shape the OnSong web API uses.
• Its file, if it's got one. An attachment keeps its original filename, so a PDF or an MP3 inside a binder is literally just that PDF or MP3.
• Folders for its kids, named after what they are — songs, attachments — each holding more folders of the exact same structure.

That structure keeps goin' all the way down: a set contains songs, a song contains attachments, & each gets its own folder with its own manifest chillin' next to its own files. A binder holdin' a book of two hundred songs? Same format as one holdin' a single chart. Isn't that wild.

Inside a manifest, references to children get marked with a $binder. prefix, so a reader can tell the difference between a value that actually belongs to the item & one that's pointin' into a folder next to it.

What It Carries

• Songs — the chord chart & literally everything attached to it.
• Sets — the songs in their order, with the set's own special arrangement.
• Books — your whole collection. All of it.
• Attachments — PDFs, images, audio, & whatever other file's hangin' with a song. You can even pick to include only the attachments you're actually usin' instead of every version ever accidentally added.

Binder Or Archive? (The Showdown)

Both will faithfully move your library's content, so the choice is really about what you're after:

• OnSong^® Archive is the old-school format. Use it if you need to play nice with earlier versions of OnSong. Amirite.
• OnSong^® Binder is the new hotness. Use it for sharin' with newer versions of OnSong — & especially when you wanna open up a file & actually see what's inside.

Importin' & Exportin'

Binders import like any other file does: crack open one from Files, Mail, AirDrop, or whatever cloud service you're hangin' with & pick OnSong. Import a binder holdin' a set & it recreates the set & every song in it; import one with a single song & it just adds that song. Easy peasy.

To make one, hit Share & pick OnSong Binder as your format. Done.

Binders are also what OnSong Connect sends between devices when one device is all like "yo, send me that song or set" — so the same format chilling in your Files app is the one travelin' over the network. Fancy, right.

Because a binder is literally just a ZIP of plain JSON & ordinary media files, it's the perfect format when you need to see what OnSong actually stored under the hood — or when something else needs to read your content & it ain't OnSong.